David Gritten meets Stephen Poliakoff, whose glitzy new TV drama
Dancing on the Edge evokes the era when jazz musicians were the darlings of
royalty.

Dancing on the Edge, writer-director Stephen Poliakoff’s newtelevision drama for BBC Two, is easily his most ambitious work yet: a five-part series set in early-Thirties Britain, with a huge cast of characters ranging from royalty to the very poor, and big themes – including economic depression, celebrity culture and immigration.

Yet another major element in Dancing on the Edge is its music. Unfolding events are seen through the eyes of a fictional black jazz band who rapidly achieve success, start to play engagements in luxury London hotels and chic clubs, and soon become the darlings of a high-society crowd.

This 11-piece band are led by their urbane pianist Louis Lester (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), who writes all their material. He and his musicians witness and become embroiled in other people’s power struggles, corruption and violence.

By placing Louis and his colleagues at the centre of the action, Poliakoff acknowledges a largely forgotten aspect of British musical history; black musicians, most of them playingjazz, were all the rage among London’s rich and beautiful set in the Thirties.

“There was this wonderful conjunction of this music leading members of the aristocracy to mingle with black musicians and it became very fashionable,” Poliakoff says. As with so many trends in high society back then, the royal family was influential in its growth, which began a few years previously.

“The Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, went to see the singer Florence Mills many times,” Poliakoff says. Mills, an American cabaret singer who sometimes performed risqué songs (I’m Cravin’ For That Kind of Love) and toured Europe with her revue, Blackbirds, in 1926, was the first black American to become an international star.

Mills died the following year, but the Prince was hooked on black music; Poliakoff says that in his researches for his acclaimed BBC television drama The Lost Prince, “I learnt that he had hung around with the Duke Ellington band [who visited Britain in 1933]. That haunted me for many years.”

The Prince of Wales and his younger brother Prince George often went out on the town together to listen to black jazz bands. (The popular press dubbed them “the playboy princes”.) Dancing on the Edge includes a scene with the two princes arriving at a posh London hotel to see the Lester band play – and by staying to dance, bestowing royal approval.

This attraction for the British aristocracy to black musicians echoed what had already happened in America. Fashionable New Yorkers had flocked to the Cotton Club in Harlem – for part of its heyday a whites-only establishment – to see black entertainers such as Ellington, Cab Calloway and Jimmie Lunceford.

“There was obviously something exotic about [black musicians] to people who had everything and were of a slightly bohemian bent,” says Dancing on the Edge’s musical director Paul Englishby. Yet these same musicians had to enter and leave many of the exclusive venues they played by the back door.

Inevitably, scandals arose from this fraternising between the musicians and Britain’s high society. Prince George is widely believed to have had a fling with Florence Mills back in the Twenties. Edwina Mountbatten reportedly had a liaison with “Hutch”, Grenada-born cabaret singer and pianist Leslie Hutchinson, who after arriving from Paris in 1927 became one of Britain’s biggest stars, playing at the best London hotels, with residencies at such venues as Café de Paris and Quaglino’s.

Then as now, musicians had sexual magnetism. Yet their music had powerful appeal too. The Prince of Wales was a genuine Hutch fan, and as Poliakoff notes, “ended up playing drums – rather badly, one imagines – at a party thrown by Lord Beaverbrook with Duke Ellington’s band”. This is referenced in Dancing on the Edge, though Poliakoff has Prince George enthusiastically sitting in on drums with Lester’s band at a private party.

Some black jazz musicians in London in the Thirties were American; others hailed from the Caribbean, but many had spent time in New York. A number had worked in the Merchant Navy, or played in bands on cruise ships.

A few names emerged as key figures on whom the Lester story might be loosely based. Ken “Snakehips” Johnson, born in Guyana, was a bandleader and dancer, who gained his nickname from his fluid dance movies. “He was very handsome,” Poliakoff says. “He looked like a young Denzel Washington.”

Johnson joined the Emperors of Jazz, fronted by popular Jamaican jazz trumpeter Leslie Thompson. He took over the band in 1936, and later led the West Indian Orchestra, who were playing a residency at Café de Paris in March 1941 when the London venue was hit by Luftwaffe bombs; Snakehips, with 33 others, died in the blast.

Then there was Leslie “Jiver” Hutchinson (not to be confused with “Hutch”). Jiver was also a trumpeter from Jamaica, and played with Trinidadian drummer Happy Blake’s band at Soho’s Cuba Club before joining Thompson’s Emperor of Jazz.

All these men were stars in their own right, the talk of the town. Poliakoff’s creation Lester is a composite. “We imagined he’d seen Duke Ellington in the States, heard cutting-edge jazz in USA and brought it back to Britain,” says Englishby. “So we took certain liberties, because his fictional band are pushing musical boundaries. They’re not stuck in rigid post-Twenties rhythms.

“Their music is really more typical of the late Thirties than the years in which the series is set,” the series’ composer Adrian Johnston adds. “I wanted to move from a raw form of jazz to something more sophisticated to show Louis’s development as the story progressed.”

Johnston’s songs and lyrics and Englishby’s arrangements combined to create a Louis Lester Songbook – a body of work by a fictional musician. They devised some 40 original numbers for the Lester band to play on-screen; half of them now also appear on a soundtrack album.

They and Poliakoff agreed the Lester band needed two female vocalists and auditioned singers who might also act, without success. Finally they found two actresses who could sing: Angel Coulby (Gwen in television’s Merlin) and Wunmi Mosaku.

“Angel is a mezzo and Wunmi is alto, which was ideal,” says Englishby. “Both sang on the album. When we heard Angel we were thanking the Lord. She has this voice that sounds like it was from the Thirties – it’s totally natural. Wunmi’s is deeper, with a Nina Simone/Sarah Vaughan feel. You can’t teach people that.”

Thus music forms the bedrock of the series and its portrayal of a unique, vibrant era in music history. “If we think in terms of the enormous racism at that time, there was a window where things might have turned out differently,” Poliakoff says. “I find that a wonderfully haunting time to set a drama.”

Dancing on the Edge begins on BBC Two on Monday, February 4. The soundtrack album is released this week on Decca